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10 Dec 2016 2:38:08pm

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Mel,

I think that you maybe, and Hart certainly, are setting up a false dichotomy that offers a very limited perspective beyond allowing for positions to be at odds for reasons that some will use to justify politicising a disagreement that probably doesn't even really exist.

Maybe we have personal perspectives that come from the love we feel for the people closest to us that would lead us to defend their lives over those of strangers. We can also reflect upon how our sense of grief for the loss of a complete stranger deepens when it emerges that theirs may have been a life of altruistic self sacrifice.

On the other hand I earlier pointed out that there are certain justifications to killing that we occasionally use to inform the conditions under which we may justifiably act to preserve our own existence. When people reach an advanced age then we're again forced to confront the inevitability of death as inherently part of our human circumstance in a way that is more difficult to accept when young lives are cut short.

So when we say that we value all human life equally we apply a principle that might ideally be unqualified, whereas some would point out that many circumstances in we're likely to confront are anything but ideal.

So I simply don't think that it is good enough to suppose that all these understandable perspectives that might lead to value judgements about life are somehow to be dismissed as utilitarian. It was as if the only two philosophical positions available to anyone were religious doctrine and utilitarianism. That simply isn’t true for a start, and if you think it is the dominant paradigm then you misunderstand the hearts and minds of others, and maybe even yourself, because I think we're a lot closer than you imagine.